The Internet Blog

Newzbin,OpenBitTorrent Back in Business

Two weeks ago the largest BitTorrent tracker on the Internet vanished. The hosting company of the tracker was ordered to take it offline after Hollywood managed to get a court decision in their favor. Today, OpenBitTorrent returns to the web from a new home, managing torrent connections as if nothing happened. Major Usenet Indexer shuts down last month after a legal defeat. Now.It is up with new owner

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In the last two year the entertainment industries have targeted many BitTorrent sites. The majority of the verdicts against these sites have thus far ruled in favor of the copyright holders. Only in Spain have BitTorrent sites been repeatedly found to operate within the boundaries of the law.

In mid May the ISP Portlanedisconnected major public BitTorrent Tracker OpenBitTorrent .Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted said that, “OpenBitTorrent is used for file sharing, and we suspect that it is the Pirate Bay tracker with a new name. It is added by default on all of the torrent tracker files on Pirate Bay” .

In a surprising verdict in a case started by Hollywood movie companies, the Court handed out an injunction to OpenBitTorrent’s hosting provider Portlane, ordering it to cease to provide Internet access to the tracker. Portlane was ordered to provide name & e-mail address of people behind Open BitTorrent else face SEK 500,000 ($63,633) in fine.

Following this decision OpenBitTorrent was pulled offline. We contacted the operators of the site who told us that they would be looking for a new hosting provider to bring back their tracker, so it could continue to coordinate the communications between the millions of people that were using it daily.

Newzbin Story

After losing a legal battle against Hollywood major Usenet indexer shuts down its operations last month.Chris,The real operator,said that Newzbin has been sold twice. About a week later rumors stated talking that some people hacked newzbin & will bring it back online soon. Latert we reported that Newzbin got new Seychelles based owner . “Team R Dogs” ,message ex-members of Newzbin claiming that they would soon bring back the site lat month. In an Interview with DeepShare thay said that they are doing this all for money. They want to provide a good service and take the same profits the Newzbin1 guys did.

Back in Business

Now both are back in business,as we checked OpenBitTorrent started tracking all torrents without any problem & Newzbin is also back online.It is now accepting logins & new signups. Looks like both sites are tecnically stable & fully operational now. Current IP used by OpenBitTorrent is from Netherlands (84.243.202.178) belongs to Sologigabit C.V. . The traffic to OpenBitTorrent is around 11000 now that far less from its real traffic. it is not clear whether Portlane has been supplied identities OR not.

OpenBitTorrent is currently battling for the title of the worlds largest BitTorrent tracker with PublicBitTorrent,OpenTracker, another standalone trackers that runs on the Opentracker software. Both trackers handle the communications of between 20 and 30 million BitTorrent users at any given time of the day.

Although it’s good to see that OpenBitTorrent has been resurrected, it’s worth nothing that the majority of all BitTorrent users probably never noticed that it had disappeared. Most torrents today come with several backup trackers that are used in case one goes down, and even without trackers at all DHT ensures that downloads continue to work.

UPDATE : Open BitTorrent went Offline again. May be some minor problem